The story draws to a close. In the garden of Gethsemane Jesus felt the possibility of a tragic end to his hopes of an early coming of the Kingdom. The real situation shines clear through all the legend which a later age has woven around it. When he saw himself surrounded by a multitude of armed men, he knew that resistance was vain. He was delivered into the hands of his enemies. Through all the humiliation and pain of those days, he seems to have hoped that his God would rescue him. It was only on the cross that he finally gave up hope. The heavens were dumb as they always have been and always will be.
The body of Jesus was probably thrown into the common pit reserved for malefactors, as Abbé Loisy suggests, while the story of the burial by Joseph of Arimathea grew up to save him from the terrible dishonor of such a last resting-place. The rest of the traditional narrative is unquestionably mythical. Paul speaks of him as buried and evidently thinks of the risen Jesus as an incorruptible or spiritual man. Paul did not believe in a bodily resurrection. The visions which led to a belief in the resurrection of Jesus were ecstatic in character. We must remember that the ancients were far less critical than we are in regard to dreams and illusions and did not consider a return to life in some shadowy form as very unusual. I have not the { 83} slightest difficulty in my own mind in accounting for the belief in the resurrection of Jesus in an entirely natural way. Once this belief arose and became important as a part of a new religion, the rise of legendary details was simply inevitable.
The position I have taken is relatively conservative. Many scholars have even become skeptical whether such a person as Jesus ever lived. We cannot be certain but it seems more plausible to give a relative credence to the older strands of tradition in the New Testament. That such an ethical reformer lived who believed in the coming of the Messianic kingdom, that he was embroiled with the priestly class and was done to death by them with the aid of the Roman governor who feared a seditious outbreak, that his disciples after his death came to believe in his resurrection and his coming Messiahship upon earth, all this appears to me more than probable. Human life is a fertile field for tragedy. The more we rid the narratives of their fairy-story accompaniments and see Jesus, not as a god who foreknows his human life and plays it out gravely as an actor who knows his role, but as a human being hurried to issues he had not at first dreamed of, the more his career becomes comprehensible. Its pathos is increased by this truer perspective, while the moral grandeur of his life gains by the human atmosphere which descends upon it. He lived his life sincerely as other men have done and did not dream of the use history would make of his name.